Getting Beyond a Joke

Today has been a funny old day. Early this afternoon one of my favourite authors, Joanne Harris, tweeted that a story called Taken by the T-Rex was at #677 in Amazon’s sales rankings. Her only comment to the story was *headdesk*.

I nearly always follow links that she posts, and so naturally I followed this one. Imagine my surpise when I was presented with a seventeen-page monstrosity about a prehistoric girl being ravished by a T-Rex. I mean, you just can’t write this stuff.

Oh, wait. Someone did.

The reviews were amongst the most hilarious things I have ever read. Though ostensibly 5-star, they were clearly from witty customers exercising their right to sarcasm. I don’t want to copy these people’s words without their permission, but here is the link: Taken by a T-Rex by Christie Sims

Jenna (Grey) and I about peed ourselves laughing . . . but when we thought about it, we realised there is a darker side to it all. In order to reach a sales ranking of #677, Sims would probably need to sell thousands of copies since publication on 27th September 2013. A glance not only at the content but also the level of technical skill would lead anyone to infer it was turned out in a matter of days. Yet Sims is undoubtedly making hundreds if not thousands of dollars from it and her other, equally ludicrous titles, such as Ravished by the Triceratops. Yeah. People are buying it purely to laugh at it. But really, she’s taking that spot away from someone that has worked their entire lives to learn their craft, who works for hours day in and day out to produce quality fiction, and who may depend upon that income to survive. We break our backs and we break our hearts, but I doubt if Sims broke a nail. Even the review system, here, has become a joke, because these 5-stars are given purely in a derisive manner . . . yet it will make the title appear higher up in the search results because of them.

My reply to Joanne Harris? “I see your *headdesk* and raise you a WTF.”